Ronnie Ritchie BFA Illustration Thesis Spring 2014

Dancing Around the Truth: Essentialization and Resistance in Transgender Autobiography

They’re such a GQUTIE! One genderqueer artist’s explorations of gender and all the things connected to it. Includes ten pages of comics as the start of a webcomic and a sixteen-page zine. See more at gqutiecomics.com!

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I will take another comic another time to elaborate on just what was going on in my head when I worked out the entire gender thing, but for now, let’s enjoy the priorities I had roughly a year ago!

I’m looking back to this project’s genesis, which was in the numerous doodles I did over the spring and summer of last year, trying to consolidate how I looked and how I felt. Communication is a big part of how I work as an artist, and it seeps into how I

This comic is called GQUTIE, so what better way to start than thinking about what “cuteness” has meant to me? I’ve been called “cute” for basically my whole life, and trying to embrace that “cuteness” had the unexpected side-effect of realizing that my id

I took ballet classes for six years as a kid, but after stopping them, I had another ten years of an ambivalent relationship with my physical ability. Being able to come back to ballet has been enormously healing for me.

It’s the little things, like finding a word that describes you perfectly in the right context.

This week, we have a little bit of my feelings one time I tried going to a trans support group. It might have been the wrong week to go, or perhaps just the wrong group, but it did leave a bit of an impression.

Needless to say, my relationship to feminism, and especially feminist spaces in Portland, has become a lot more complicated lately.

I took ballet classes for six years as a kid, but after stopping them, I had another ten years of an ambivalent relationship with my physical ability. Being able to come back to ballet has been enormously healing for me.

This week, we have my only memory as a kid considering gender variance. Would things have been different if I had been supported in my statement? I don’t really know.

This shows the dramatic difference in timing between the first sketch and the final comic. By not trying to unpack the complicated methods through which I discovered my gender via my sexuality, I reduced the first four panels into two, allowing for a sing

At my school, our first semester was spent developing a pitch for our thesis project, and an example of finished work was part of that pitch. This was that comic.

This shows the growth in style between this comic (the first I attempted of the series) and what is the final. By adding more containing lines, I was able to use screentones in the backgrounds as well to add a stronger mood, and using dark grey instead of

This piece catylized the change in my art that happened early in the Fall 2013 semester. Under the theme "tricksters" for the class Gods, Heroes, and Monsters, I depicted myself as a Trickster, a being of liminal gender space, between male and female. The

This comic was never brought to completion. It was determined to be too similar to Body Context, which communicated more clearly what it felt like to not fit into the greater trans community.